The U.S. government doesn't want people looking at the phone records of the people whom they are spying on.

The Associated Press has learned that while the Obama administration is considering moving its collection of phone-surveillance records from the National Security Agency to be stored at phone companies or elsewhere, it is also funding research that would find a way to prevent phone-company employees from seeing whom the U.S. is looking into.

At least five research teams across the country have been paid by the office of the director of National Intelligence to develop a system for high-volume, encrypted searches of electronic records, AP reports.

According to public documents obtained by AP and interviews with researchers, corporate executives and government officials under the project, U.S. data mining would be hidden by secret coding that would conceal any identifying details from outsiders.

The research comes from several potential ideas that would allow the government to stop actually storing Americans' phone records, but still search them if need be.